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Hunters Denied Boarding For Insufficient Visa Pages

(posted August 31, 2012)

Several hunters on their way to South Africa and Namibia have been denied boarding by airlines due to an insufficient number of visa pages in their passports. According to Steve Turner at Travel with Guns, two hunters traveling to South Africa with Delta and another going to Namibia aboard Lufthansa were forced to miss their scheduled flights until they could have additional pages added to their passports to meet the entry requirements of those two countries.

"In the past, airline agents may have been lax about this," says Turner, "but they seem to be cracking down and enforcing all such requirements, as airlines can be fined for allowing passengers with insufficient documentation to travel to another country."

For sure, these requirements are not new. Make sure you check the entry requirements of any country you are visiting this season and check the number of blank pages you have in your passport. Remember, blank observation/endorsement pages are not acceptable as visa pages.

According to the US State Department's Travel website, South African law requires travelers to have one blank (unstamped) visa page in their passport to enter the country. In practice, however, travelers may need more than one page "as there have been instances in the past of South African immigration officers requiring travelers to have two blank pages." That allows one for the South African temporary residence permit sticker that is issued upon entry to the country, and an additional page for entry and exit stamps for South Africa and other countries to be visited en route to South Africa or elsewhere in the region.

For Namibia, passports must have at least six months of validity remaining beyond your planned date of departure from Namibia. US State also encourages all travelers to or from Namibia via South Africa to have six or more unstamped visa pages in their passport. The State Department warns, "Visitors who do not have enough blank visa pages in their passport risk being denied entry and returned to the United States at their own expense."

If you do not have enough pages left in your passport or your passport will expire before the time required by a country you are visiting, you will need to either get an appointment at a passport office or use an expediting service to have pages added to your passport or get it renewed. Instructions for this and a list of passport agencies are available on the Travel.State website. You can also use the expediting service The Hunting Report uses, CIBT.

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